Work Wanted column: Besides LinkedIn, these social media sites are standouts for sharing resumes

For more than 300 million users, LinkedIn has become their virtual portfolio, a place to list work history, community service, body of work, and references. It’s not surprising that other social sites for storing and sharing your resume are cropping up. Here are a couple of standouts.

Visual CV (www.visualcv.com) — This Canadian company (hence the term “CV” instead of resume) offers a free online service to build and share your resume privately or on your social networks. It can be used by business owners, consultants, and other professionals who might be looking for business instead of a job. You can upload media, including photographs, documents, video and audio files and link to your other social sites (your blog, for instance).

You have complete control over your privacy setting, so you can share a link to your online resume privately with a potential employer or post it publicly for the world to see. You can export your online portfolio into a PDF document to take to an interview or hiring event. More than a thousand companies have registered with Visual CV to search for candidates, so the site functions as a job-matching site as well (the jobs tend to be in Canada, but there are quite a few U.S. companies listed).

You start by creating a free membership and adding data to build your resume. When you update your resume, it will be updated across all your shared links, so your resume is always current when people click the link you’ve sent them. You can create more than one version of your resume for different job targets.

Creating a robust online portfolio will help you if you don’t have a strong presence in social networks like Facebook. They imbed SEO (search engine optimization) so that your resume link is what shows up when someone searches for you on Google or Yahoo. You’ll be able to be found more easily and make a positive first impression, critical since recruiters are searching online for you before they ever pick up the phone. You can upload video files of you answering typical interview questions (like “tell me about yourself”) and allow recruiters to get a preview of your personality.

Resume Bucket (www.resumebucket.com) offers the same easy loading and sharing features (it claims that it takes just 30 seconds to upload your resume and get started.) The site also offers a resume builder to start from scratch. You can customize your resume link to include your name or version of your targeted document; one resume will be tagged as your “primary” and the others as alternates. You have access to data on how many times your resume has been viewed and to a large selection of online postings organized by occupation and state location. A quick search from jobs around Jacksonville included 753 openings, many of them high-quality professional positions.

Resume Bucket has a built-in messaging system and privacy settings that include the option for requiring a password before anyone can view your profile. The site also offers free career advice through its blog and free samples of resumes and cover letters. You can choose a resume sample, upload it, edit it for your career and use it as your Resume Bucket resume.

If you update your resume often, using an online service can help you manage versions easily. You’ll also update your image as being digitally savvy in an increasingly digital world.

Candace Moody is vice president of communications for CareerSource Northeast Florida. Her column appears every Wednesday in the Times-Union. If you have a question about employment, email her at cmoody@careersourcenefl.com.